Vintage Mopar Drag Racing Photography - Good Ol’ Days Revisited

We’ve all seen the work of the magazine photographers who attended drag races back in the day, and they created much of the iconic imagery that we now use to recall the heritage of that time period. There were hundreds of fans who came with amateur camera equipment as well, and what is left of these treasures is now buried in envelopes and desk drawers, waiting to be seen again. Former Mopar Muscle editor and motorsports historian Geoff Stunkard has accumulated several troves of this material over the years, and we convinced him to share some of it with us.

Some of this was in very small quantity; for example, the black-and-white material seen here was shot by a West Coast freelancer named Lynn Wineland, who was primarily a motorcycle photographer. Lucky for us, Lynn attended the 1964 Drag Festival in England, and the 1965 Winternationals. Stunkard bought all of the film Lynn had, in order to acquire the half-dozen rolls that featured this material. The 35mm material from the Midwest and Canada came from a source off of eBay and was interspersed with college dorm room decor, travel images, and photographic experiments in a selection of preserved slide carousels. The material from Pomona and Bakersfield in the early 1970s was a group of 126 negatives that was found by motorsports dealer Mike Goyda. None of this material has been put up on Stunkard’s aptly-named quartermilestones.com photo site yet, and he dug into his unpublished archive and historical info to give us some excellent, if not perfect, blasts from the past from the Mopar perspective.